The free world is the new continent in cyberspace that we have built so we can live here in freedom. It's impossible to live in freedom in the old world of cyberspace, where every program has its feudal lord that bullies and mistreats the users. So, to live in freedom we have to build a new continent. Because this is a virtual continent, it has room for everyone, and there are no immigration restrictions. - Richard Stallman -

Antomic is a project to build a free operating system based on GNU and other free software.

Apkg is Antomic's package manager. It's inspired from Debian's dpkg, hence the name. Like most things in Antomic it was designed with one goal in mind - simplicity. Although apkg is simple it does not mean it's limited in it's capabilities, apkg will support all essential functions that a GNU/Linux package manager should.

Unlike other package managers that are written in C/C++, Perl or Python, apkg is a shell script making it easy to modify and adapt. What this means is that the user can easily make apkg do things that it wasn't originally designed to do, for example non-functional sections of a filesystem like documentation need not be redundantly stored on a network. Here the user can modify apkg and make it delete documentation containing in a package after it has been installed.

Antomic's binary package format is clean and easily understandable. Let's take the GNU bash package - bash-2.05_2.pkg as an example.

bash-2.05_2.pkg: This is really a simple tar archive. The filename consists of four distinct parts. "bash", "2.05", "2" and "pkg". Here "bash" is the package name, other package names would be glibc-dev, libxml2, libart_lgpl, etc. "2.05" is the upstream version of the software. "2" is the package release number also known as the Antomic version of the package and "pkg" is the file extension.